Interview with Evil-Dog

Updated 2012-04-22 15:33:57

On Newgrounds, the list of great musicians worthy of being mentioned is few and far between. Even fewer are skilled enough to have program their own flash games. How many of those few can say they have created a mini-Internet phenomenon (I'm not sucking up, am I)?

Evil-Dog is among the best known Newgrounders, one of the few and modest gods (lol) in the community. His love of punk music and considerable talent are obvious, even if one looks at Punk-O-Matic 2 alone. But if you take it all in, everything he's done... he's really something.

Luckily, even with his incredibly busy schedule, he was able to take a few minutes out of his day to answer my questions. I'm so excited that he responded after so long a silence, that my wit is unreachable. I can't make a funny. Boo hoo, woah is me. But let's get to why you're really here... here he is, Evil-Dog.

A: I'm Evil-Dog, I'm a modest God. Haha I like saying that. Nah, my real name is Marco Arsenault, I'm 29 years old and I live in Montreal, Canada. I've studied computer science and math in order to become a game developer. I've worked 5 years at Ubisoft Montreal on games like Rainbow Six Vegas 1, Far Cry 2 and Avatar: The Game. I've been making Flash projects for a long time, movies and games but since January 2010, I have my own company, Evil-Dog Productions. That just means I just stay home and work on my own games. I believe I'm mostly known for the Punk-O-Matic games and I'm now working full time on a bunch of new games. I'm also a long time musician and some people may know me for my punk and ambient music, but that's probably mostly on Newgrounds.
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A:I've been listening to music as far as I can remember, I even listened to rap at some point, could you believe that? :D

The defining point in my life is when I was 17 (or 18 maybe), I bought a guitar and an amp for only $100, best deal in my entire life. I was still using that guitar until recently, 11 years later. But before that, in high school, I was in a music program, so I learned piano, singing, musical history, the trombone. I'm convinced all this planted a good musical seed in my mind, gave me a good ear and a sense of rhythm but that's hard to tell. Maybe I had it to begin with, maybe I didn't.

A: Punk-O-Matic is the result of combining everything I liked at that time (things I still like today): programming, animating, composing/playing/listening to music. The idea came during one of my trip to my father's place who lives 10 hours from here. I was coming back to university and I was riding in the back seat of my friend's car back to university from the Christmas vacation and I designed the game on paper right then and there and then skipped a lot of classes making the game :D
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A: Since I made POM1, I knew I wanted to push the composition aspect much further. I also knew that by doing so I would lose a lot of casual gamer who enjoyed pressing random in POM1 and enjoying the song. POM2 requires more effort to make good songs because you have to have a better sense of music but it's for the best in my opinion. I wanted to give a lot more controls with the manual riffs which are basically all the pickings on all the chords and notes. But I also wanted to keep the spirit of POM1 and continue giving sets of pre-made/more complex riffs that people get to choose from. It's like POM1 on 8 chords or something like that. It was simply the logical follow up to me.
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A: Honestly, I was bored of POM1 after like a week, I thought all the songs sounded the same and was very impressed at how so many people were playing and kept playing for such a long time without getting bored. So I never really listened to many POM1 songs, but POM2 is different, there are still many contests going on at punk-o-matic.net, the community website. I judge these contests so I listen to a lot of amazing POM2 songs. I'm still blown away by some POM2 compositions, which tells me I succeeded with the riff structure in POM2 :)
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A: I know POM2 took 6 years to come out after POM1, but that's because I was at university, working, etc. Now making games is my full time job so POM Pro won't take as long :)

However I have many other projects, and POM Pro will still be a side project. POM Pro is gonna be more like a music software and less like a game; it won't have the story mode and the concert game-play where you play the notes. It will rather have more precise riff placement, lagless playback, an expandable riff bank, more band and jam room customization, possibly tempo control and instrument effects and a lot of other stuff :)
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